Of the men, one in particular, perhaps the youngest and most virile of the lot, also had the most haunted eyes. Leon had seen that look before—on shamans. Those who saw into other worlds and other times better than others almost always carried it—along with the resultant burdens of perhaps knowing too much.
Natty took over the spot beside Leon that Patent had vacated. “You’re definitely the man of the hour. Getting a seat next to you right now is harder than getting one at Wrigley Field during the World Series.”
“You shouldn’t be here, Natty.”
“Just wanted to tell you that after getting the intel back from Satellite’s insect droids, the Nautilus AIs hacked their language. You ought to be able to communicate just fine.”
“Satellite already brought me up to speed on that point.” Leon craned toward him to give him the beady eye. “Besides, you could have told me that from the ship.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“We decided now’s not the time for talk. We’re going in, guns blazing.”
“Really? You’re right. I should have stayed on the ship.”
Leon gestured for his people to move in.
“Wait,” Natty said. “You aren’t using the nanococktail I designed for you to make yourselves giants first?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Leon charged ahead, intent on catching up to his men.
Natty stayed where he was, shaking his head slowly. “That guy’s taking the whole underdog thing way too seriously.” Natty decided it was time for a strategic retreat and headed the other way—across dense woods, and worse, the clearings that separated them.
***
Natty’s idea of fun did not include risking getting stepped on by a giant. But Alpha Unit’s welcoming arms left something to be desired, as did its idea of a safe haven.
Laney, who had beamed down to ensure her latest nanococktails to help with acclimating to the planet took, was, ironically, the first to succumb to the shortcomings of the new formula. She lay on a gurney with several Alpha Team triage medics attending her. Natty wasn’t far behind her; he was staggering, coughing, sweating profusely, his 20-20 vision now more like 100-100. Crossing the distance between where Omega Force was stationed and where Alpha Unit was stationed, even with the aid of one of his air-bikes—long since abandoned—had really taken it out of him. The next blur he ran into might well be a local trying to eat him. Finally, he collapsed face down in the mud. That insect determined to climb into his mouth—he could see it well enough; he wished he couldn’t. It might just be that on a land of giants—that it was the smallest things that could kill you the fastest, not the biggest things.
But why Natty and Laney ahead of all the others? Of course! Leon and his Omega Forces were so battle hardened their own systems would have built up resistances to keep them hobbling along even before Laney could beef them up further. And Alpha Unit—well, they were simply younger than Natty and Laney; their immune systems would hold up longer even on a foreign world. But they would have minutes to act before they, too, would be of no help to anyone.
The insect taking a bite out of his mouth seemed more like a friend now than an enemy; he was distracting Natty from the wracking pain everywhere else in his body.
***
Patent leaned over the gurney supporting Laney and frowned. “Whose idea was it to take this frail orchid out of the hot house?”
“Ah, hers, sir. If we can just figure out which of these nano-cocktails she gave us to use on her,” Ariel said, studying the labeling on each syringe in the kit with six of the capsules, each bearing a different colored liquid.
“We’re supposed to just know,” Starhawk, huddled beside Ariel around the gurney, said. “One of those six immune-boosters given to the six on Alpha Team that got them should be performing better than the rest.” Everyone looked around, starting with Starhawk. But they all appeared fine. “Could someone hurry up and die already!” He shouted.
Patent stood up, rolled the cigar in his mouth before taking it out. “You heard the man! Which five of you insubordinate sons of bitches has it in their minds to buck the protocol?”
The cadets all stared at one another guiltily, and accusingly, at the same time. Finally, a cough, then another. Another cadet buckled at the knees a few seconds later; a fourth ran to a bucket of water and tried to drown himself; and a fifth kept pulling at his swelling tongue that was starting to choke him. Number six held up his hand guiltily. “Get over here, you moron!” Patent barked. The kid ran up to him. “Well, which color did you get?”
“Red, sir!”
Ariel was already reaching for the syringe with the red liquid in it. She had noted, no doubt, as Patent had, that the first five to show weakness were the oldest—they might have been twenty, maybe twenty-one. Wait a minute, Natty was twenty-three. Patent did a three-sixty in his war boots. “Where the hell is Natty?!” After some shrugs and helpless gestures, he barked, “Well, go find him! And look down; he’s probably passed out somewhere.” As the cadets scattered like cockroaches he yelled after them, “And don’t forget to inject yourselves with the red solution before you land on your faces yourselves!”
Patent got on the COMMS to Leon. “Leon, you’re going to need the red solution. Get that damn thing into your arms now!” He promptly signed off.
Less than a minute later Alpha Unit cadets were pulling Natty up on a gurney beside Laney. She was already coming around. Ariel, relieved to see her looking better, switched her focus to Natty, and injected him with the red-colored syringe.
Laney gazed at the syringe in Ariel’s hand. “Interesting choice. That means the atmosphere is saturated with alien nanites—not just ours.”
Patent took the cigar out of his mouth. “Come again?” Gesturing with the cigar in the direction of Omega Force in the distance—and the hellish noise coming from that way, he said, “You do realize, these people are still playing with sticks and stones?”
Laney climbed out of the gurney with some effort, managing to get the guardrail down with some assistance and standing on her two feet by holding on to the nearest pair of strong arms. Still shaky and speaking like she had a wasp’s nest in her throat, she said, “I’d like to posit that we’re not seeing the whole picture.”
TEN
THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA
Asger lay back against the log and belched. The fire was welcoming in the blue-grey early morning light and the frigid cold; the food perhaps a little too welcoming. He farted and rubbed his stomach. “Maybe that last bird was one bird too much.”
“‘Bird,’ he says. You mean the ones we ride in lieu of dragons?” Canute laughed. He was fond of laughing at his own jokes, being as few others did.
This time, though, Asger greeted his remark with a chuckle. Canute was an abrasive old codger, but Asger understood what it was to grow close to the end of one’s fighting days. He’d gone through the same ordeal with his father, watching him transition from an amicable man to a fretful, bellicose bugger. All because he needed to channel his anger with himself for aging past his ability to defend the tribe at something, at anything.
“What the hell?” Dag was the first to reach for his weapon and to rise from the spot he’d been warming on the earth for some time. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be trifling, because giving up such a warm patch of ground was a costly decision. As he grimaced, the many scars on his face given him by a close encounter with an insect trying to lay eggs in him while he slept, lent a tremendous ferocity to his already disturbed demeanor.
The wind was gusting, and between the flurries of snow that readily gathered to form demons in dawn’s early light—all too easily mistaken for actual adversaries—and the keening sounds of the wind, all too often confused with the signaling of enemies, Asger could understand how Dag could mistake either for a reason to reach for his weapon.
Asger laughed. “Settle down, you jumpy old man, afraid of your own shadow.” Dag was another one aging past his prime, all-too re
ady to prove otherwise by always being the first to sound the warning, always faster on the draw than anyone else. Sometimes that worked in his favor, sometimes not, like now.
Dag ignored him, pointing.
Asger, though he wasn’t feeling particularly generous, considering the ache of his overfull belly and the price he paid for moving at all, decided he’d disrespected the aging warlord enough for one morning. He craned his head in the desired direction. That’s when he saw them. They were phantoms, all right, but they weren’t borne into this world on the wind. Whichever hell door they’d stepped through, they came ready to play.
Asger jumped to his feet, weapon in hand.
Eira chided him, gazing at the same phenomenon. “Whoever they are, we must thank them for helping you to work off that meal. I won’t have you feeling soft under me when I’m riding you.”
The youngest of the elders of child-bearing age, and still ageless in her face and figure, Eira was quite fond of riding indeed. Asger wondered if she was still genuinely more concerned about his stiffness vis-à-vis her pleasure-seeking than she was the enemy. Having never been defeated in battle, he wouldn’t be surprised.
Freja laughed at Eira’s taunt, already tapping her club against her palm and staring down the enemy. “His dick going soft has got nothing to do with his belly being full or not.” Freja, only slightly older than Eira, though looking as if from a different tribe with her green hair versus Eira’s red hair, was showing no less eagerness to mix it up with the enemy.
“Silence, you two! I can’t hear myself think,” Gosta barked at Eira and Freja.
“What, you busy worrying about the hundred ways you gonna die?” Hertha teased.
Hertha was the clan’s matriarch. She was tall, even for her kind, which contributed to the matriarch role, as did the wrinkle lines about her eyes and mouth, which spoke of both wisdom and the capacity to smile in the face of life’s harshest challenges. Considering this lot, she welcomed all the sense of authority she could get. She was shifting her weight continuously with an eye to her enemies surrounding them to keep her options open as to which direction she was going to charge first.
“What are these things?” Asger blared, not believing his eyes.
“They are children’s dolls, obviously, that some witch has animated,” Freja suggested.
Canute refused to hold himself in check any longer, and charged the enemy. He struck one with his spiked club. The club shattered as if it were made of rotten wood. So Canute picked up a boulder and used it to hammer the same one wearing the headdress of a white bird. The rock, too, shattered harmlessly against the chest of the doll. Canute, proudly sporting the biggest nose of anyone in the tribe, brought his head back to drive it forward with extra force into the face of his enemy, no doubt hoping to shatter the invader’s head. But he didn’t get the chance. The doll picked Canute up and flung him into a tree—about a half mile in the distance.
“Shit!” Eira exclaimed, sobering in the single batting of a Trocent’s wing.
“Well, whoever this witch is, she did a good job animating the dolls.” Asger spat his crushed and finely-chopped Salicant leaves that he’d taken to chewing on sight of the demons. There was a time when being scared to death was enough to get the heart pumping. But it took more than hell spawn to bring him back into this world anymore; it took the Salicant leaves.
“Drop your traditional weapons and grab something that’ll make a damn bit of difference,” Asger ordered.
He didn’t have to give the command twice.
They released their clubs and held up their arms. It was really all they had to do. The jewels on their metal armbands were already flashing. Once the magnetic compulsion grew great enough, their ancient weapons flew into their hands—uprooted from wherever they’d been stashed, the locations themselves long forgotten. No one had used these devices in ages. No one was sure they remembered how to use them. Hopefully, it was like riding a dragon—even if no one had ridden one of those in ages either.
The interlopers seemed to sense the new way the wind was blowing, metaphorically speaking. They went from playing statues to siege busting, charging the ones inside the circle.
The wrestling matches between Asger’s people and the enemy were rudely interrupted by the shaking of the earth. Each upheaval sent the pairs of combatants interlocked in one another’s arms flying, only to roll into the very ravines and crevasses opening up in the ground. If the falls weren’t enough to break their backs, the screeching sounds were enough to shatter their eardrums.
Asger gazed at what appeared to be stockpiles of weapons long buried being unearthed at last; sharp blades and daggers almost too big to wield. And then the various piles started shifting, as if creatures had made homes inside them.
It took a moment for his mind to register the truth of what he was seeing. Those weren’t daggers—they were fangs! And those weren’t broad blades—they were scales!
The dragons!
No one had seen them in thousands of years!
They’d been hibernating, waiting for when the day came that their riders would need them again. Something in the minds of the riders must have signaled them—some threshold of panic they’d crossed. Or maybe it was the coupling of the ancient weapons to the arm bands once again.
The dragon riders mounted their dragons—the beasts still sleepy-eyed and throwing off the stiffness of an age-long slumber—and yelled the command to get them to soar out of the canyons that were still growing in size.
When Asger looked down from the sky above, he expected to see the doll people crawling up the sides of the ravines. But they could fly! They propelled themselves from thrusters in their feet until they needed to maneuver parallel to the ground. Then the thrusters along their torsos kicked in, the feet thrusters used now only for forward momentum.
Memories of airships that flew in a similar fashion from ages gone by rushed into Asger’s mind. He wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or remembering. Either way, he couldn’t afford the distraction right now.
The doll people were unimpressed by the dragons, and the flames they could spew at their attackers, which did nothing to them. The doll people seemed more taken back by the ancient weapons Asger and his people were now employing, though Ager was ashamed to admit he’d yet to recall how to fire his.
He banged his against his dragon in frustration. The instrument looked ironically much like his club of old did, and so suitable for banging on things. But the instant it made impact with the dragon’s hide it emitted an ear-piercing pulse, accompanied by a flash of light and thunder. The doll person that had made it her mission to end him, as if so blinded by rage she was unable to take in anything else going on across the battlefield, exploded. Her parts rained down on the ground like so much ash spewed out a volcano.
The other models must not have been in range for the weapon to have any effect. Just one more doll lost its ability to fly briefly; the lights that made it glow from the inside in dawn’s early light flickered out as it fell, but quickly came back on as it regained the ability to fly. This time the effigy was shimmering on the outside as well. The shimmer… the doll had shielded itself from further such strikes—so had the others in the distance, which it must have signaled somehow. Asger recalled energy shields and their uses only as he saw one again with his own eyes. Their people’s memories were long, and kept alive by tall tales passed on from one generation to another, but there were limits. Asger must have been alive in the time of the last such attack. He was many thousands of years old, as were all the others in his tribe. Dag and Canute were older still; rest assured he’d grill them at the first opportunity for what else they could tell Asger about their adversaries.
Asger dared a glance below, away from the battle ensuing in the air. Ant-people were crawling all over the fallen doll person. Could these dolls be their creations? He flew down for a closer look, directing the dragon with the word for “descend.” “Daful!”
From much closer, the miniature
people were much bigger than he thought, but still mere feet in height. They were not firing upon him and focused on the dead doll. He let them attend to their fallen comrade and returned to the land of the clouds above to rejoin the fighting.
***
Patent regarded his people crawling over the NAR, broken as if taken apart by a kid that was done playing with his LEGO toy. The teens looked like those cleaner fish that swam with sharks, considering their size relative to the Goliath Bots, as the NARs had been referred to at one time when Alpha Unit had first encountered them in the Amazon jungle.
Ariel ran up to Patent with her findings. It was amazing she had any this fast. She was holding a frayed wire in her one hand and a scanner in the other. “I gather that was some kind of EMP device,” Patent said.
“Yes and no,” she informed him. “The sound we heard… It was like whale sound on our world. It summoned a beast; it was the beast that chomped down on the NAR, leading to what you see here.”
She showed him the phantom creature swimming in the soup of clouds above, discernible only in outline, the outline itself a kind of outpouring of energy along its periphery. It looked like a prehistoric shark, but built for the air, its air sacs bloated to keep it aloft, giving it a more pregnant look, or like a hybrid shark-air balloon.
“Wonderful.” Patent handed the display back to her. “As if the giants weren’t enough. Now we find they can summon helpers from other realms, bigger and badder still.” Patent thought it was a good moment for a chew, and slipped some tobacco out of a can into his mouth. He and at least some of his opponents had one thing in common, their love for chewing tobacco and its ability to sharpen the mind and dull the pain at the same time. Though heaven knows what they used for tobacco on this world; Patent had glimpsed the women chewing down no less shamelessly on the stimulant as their dragons swooped down overhead to get another angle on the flying NARs.
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